In this edition of Things You Might Not Have Seen, I will talk about the 2016 movie, The Curse of Sleeping Beauty. Sleeping Beauty is my favorite fairytale, so I was excited to come across a darker adaptation of it.
Thomas Kaiser is a painter who often dreams about a beautiful sleeping girl, but is unable to wake her. When he tries to kiss her, he wakes up with terrifying headaches.
He inherits an ancestral mansion with an ancient curse stemming back to the Crusades. There are reports of people going missing or dying in mysterious circumstances. That night, while sleeping at the property, Thomas dreams of the girl again and is able to kiss and wake her up. She tells him her name is Briar Rose and that he can wake her now that they are close in the physical world.
Thomas, and few researcher friends he makes, believes he must wake Rose in order to break the curse. They believe that a djinn put Rose in an eternal sleep. Thomas finds and battles demons in the house, including a Veiled Demon, while trying to wake the beautiful Briar Rose to rescue her from a terrifying netherworld.
There is a cliffhanger ending that is easy to predict, if you look at the clues in the movie. I won’t give away the ending 😋
I will admit that I saw the movie based just on the image below 😍 A sleeping beauty with goth elements. It is such a haunting image that it was hard for me to resist.
This movie had potential, but in the end it felt like a first draft of a novel. It needed better editing, and needed to explore the theme a bit more, rather than leave it at that cliffhanger ending. I liked the movie for attempting something new from a classic fairytale.
🥳 I have an announcement to make about my next project. I am currently working on a dark fantasy retelling of Sleeping Beauty that I am very excited about. I will let you know more about it in the coming weeks, so stay tuned for that.
I hope that you liked today’s blog post. Thank you for reading 😊
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